Sulaimaniyah, Iraq: Ex-Iraqi president and Kurdish leader Jalal Talabani died on Tuesday in Germany, officials in his party said. Talabani, 83, was Iraq’s president from 2005 to 2014 and a key figure in Iraqi Kurdistan, where voters last week overwhelmingly backed independence in a disputed referendum.
“Our leader died in Germany,” an official with Talabani’s Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) said.
Iraqi Kurdish lawmaker Zana Said paid tribute to Talabani as “the only president whose death saddens Arabs, Kurds and all other ethnicities”.
Talabani’s death, following a decades-old struggle for Kurdish statehood, came after Iraq’s Kurds voted 92.7 per cent in favour of independence in the September 25 referendum.
Talabani was an avuncular politician and a skilled negotiator, who spent years building bridges between the country’s divided factions, despite his efforts for Kurdish independence.
Born in 1933 in the mountain village of Kalkan, he studied law at Baghdad University and did a stint in the army before joining the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) of Mullah Mustafa Barzani, father of current Kurdistan regional president Masoud Barzani.
Talabani took to the hills in a first uprising against the Iraqi government in 1961 but famously fell out with Barzani, who sued for peace with Baghdad. — AFP
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